At the Bosom of the Lord: Maternal Gestures in Christian Images of God from the 16th and 17th Centuries

Torben Hanhart (Scherbarth Fellow)

The dissertation project examines depictions of the Christian God from the 16th and 17th centuries in which the gestures of the Trinitarian figures call forth maternal iconographies. For example, representations are discussed in which Christ’s devotion to believers is compared to breastfeeding a child. The focus falls upon works from Italy and Flanders.
The project asks about the images of God that are cultivated in the belief of the remarkable closeness and intimacy between father and son – a belief that achieves fulsome expression in this corpus. Of particular interest is the underlying relationship between God and man not least because the understanding of this relationship is encoded into the relationship between the viewer and these intimate representations. To this end, attention is also given to how the corpus relates to maternal descriptions of God that can be found in the Bible and contemporary texts.
The second main focus of the research is to locate the corpus in the visual culture of this period. In addition to the ideas of fatherhood and masculinity that emerge from the gestures of the Trinitarian people, the relationship of such ideas to Mary is examined in more depth. By exploring a new perspective based upon the study of images of God and Marian veneration in Catholicism, this project goes beyond the findings of earlier research that was devoted to similar representations in the visual culture of the Reformation and that assumed that Mary was displaced from the systems of religious symbolism.